I don’t know if you’ve heard but Australia has been having a few teensy-weensy bushfires recently.
How many hectares is it now? Ask Google, your psychic friend:
The answer is about 6 million hectares so far in the 2019/2020 season. That’s quite a lot.
Rumour has it that the severity of the bushfires may be a teensy-weensy bit related to human CO2 emissions and fair dinkum climate change.
How is this rumour going down in the murky diarrhoea that is Australian politics?
I’m so glad you asked.
I have today for you a 24 hour snapshot of that mythical world: 15 January 2020.
Requirements before proceeding any further: one of these nose clips.
Righty ho. Let’s go.
To begin, here’s a great article called “Prime Minister defends coal as more businesses pull out of industry”.
“Prime Minister Scott Morrison delivered a spirited defence of coal mining in Canberra after the world’s largest fund manager, US-based company BlackRock, revealed it will cut its investment in the other black rock – thermal coal.”
He then collapsed in a coughing fit from the bushfire smoke that briefly gave Canberra the world’s worst air quality, smiled weakly, patted a koala that was lying smouldering on the ground, farted twice, and hopped back on the plane to Hawaii.
Another great read is this one about the Australian government axing funding to a climate change adaption body back in 2017.
“Ebony Bennett, the Australia Institute deputy director, said the decision to cut the NCCARF’s adaptation funding was “shortsighted” and “typical of the Coalition approach to climate policy.
“Any economist will tell you an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure,” she said. “The government’s new embrace of adaptation and resilience is welcome, but it’s the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approach.
“To reduce the amount of gas and coal mined and burned in Australia is the [better] response … to prevent hotter and drier summers in future.”
Guess who the treasurer was back then?
Ok, that was too easy.
Next!
Here’s a particularly hallucinatory article on the climate denier muppets in the current Australian government.
Craig Kelly:
“A serial and constant denier of climate change, the New South Wales MP most recently made international headlines when he called a British meteorologist an “ignorant pommie weather girl” after openly denying the existence of climate change.
George Christensen:
“The Queensland MP continues to point to debunked and false theories that arson is to blame for the majority of blazes this summer. He also openly and consistently disputes the link between climate change and worsening disasters and “hat tips” Kelly for his work in this space, linking to Kelly’s posts.”
And there are plenty more of them. This is amazing.
And last but definitely not “last” (the quantity of daily madness out of the Australian government is not teensy-weensy), my joyful discovery that there are other new coal mines being planned in Australia, not just the Adani one.
“A last-ditch plea to the Queensland government to stop Clive Palmer building a coal mine at a nature reserve is likely to go unanswered.
“Mr Palmer's Waratah Coal company has federal and state government approval to extract 40 million tonnes of thermal coal each year from a nature reserve in central Queensland.
“In 2002, the Queensland government recognised the area as a nature refuge to protect birds, including the endangered black-throated finch, reptiles and other animals.”
This one is called the China First project.
I shit you not.
“The mine, known as the China First project, would destroy the nature refuge, a fact acknowledged by Queensland's Coordinator-General in 2013.”
What a strange country.